Wrestlevania

Pfft! Grab rails are for girls! Last (and only) time I went pillion was on the back of a Buell XB 1300 Fire Bolt, which has a tiny shelf of a pillion seat, with a pathetic little strap right under your arse to cling onto. Also, were you to slide back more than couple inches, you'd actually be on the back wheel! Talk about "shit yourself"... Anyway, here's this weekend for your reading pleasure: Friday Having completed the single-player campaign of Halo 3 on Thursday night, I felt brave enough to try out multiplayer for the first time. And it was absolutely brilliant fun. Got to bed about 2am, having played for 5hrs straight. :tup: Saturday Look after the kids all day as usual, do the recycling, not much else daytime wise. In the evening, Mrs V. - for the first time since discovering Quake II had a god mode - asked to play a game! Woohoo! Even better, we played Halo 3 in co-op on easy, and I duly registered her on Xbox Live too. By the end of a 2.5hr play session, she was duel wielding pistols like a demon and actually getting quite confident with the dual-stick controls. So much so, she'd like to play again sometime--huzzah! :tup: Sunday Plan to go up and work on the new house's garden whilst Mrs V. takes the girls to their first family service at church, see if they like it. T, my 8-month-old son, duly falls asleep after they've gone and sleeps for about 2hrs, meaning he doesn't get up until lunchtime by which time I can't go and do the garden. Lots of quiet Internet surfing though, which is a rare treat. Mrs V. returns with the girls, we have a nice roast dinner and then settle down to watch Brother Bear for the first time, which turns out to be complete shit--Disney deserve to go down the toilet for shallow, pandering crap like this! Having converted Mrs V. to contemporary Chinese cinema with Hero, we watch House of Flying Daggers together in the evening and are somewhat disappointed. It's not a patch on Hero, but it's stunning to watch all the same--especially the scenery.

Facist! Took this puppy (i.e. Halo 3) online on Friday night, joined a friend's custom multiplayer game of 'Zombie' and much hilarity ensued. For those not familiar, 'Zombie' is a gametype where all-but-one of you start on one team, with one person being the zombie (the opposing team). Zombies are only allowed a melee weapon, humans usually having shotguns--for thematic accuracy, natch. And when a zombie kills a human, they obviously resurrect as a new zombie. The game ends when everyone is a zombie. Anyway, this time was a bit different and a bit special: zombies were set to 200% running speed, 2x jump height and given gravity hammers. Charging around the map, 11-on-1, trying to get the last human - who was tearing about the place on a Mongoose for dear life - has been the highlight of playing Halo 3 so far. We should have a Thumbs Halo 3 night - it would r0x0r.

It's a way of automatically managing your individual devices' network addresses--very handy.

I think the fact that it's the most important release for the system to date but doesn't look as good as "lesser" titles that came before it. I'm on my second play-through at the moment and it's lost none of its initial "ooh pretty!" impact at all. It's a good-looking game and Bungie should be getting credit for this.

I'm running wireless in my house and it was unusable until I switched the "channel" it was broadcasting on. Then I could use it anywhere--even outside. Check your router's settings and see if you can change the broadcast channel/frequency. That might help. Also: your thread title is 100% inaccurate.

This is an entirely different discussion.

Spook Country I'm certainly interested in, as I've read pretty much every other novel Gibson's done. Not sure about the Ender's series though; think I'd rather plough my limited reading time into the His Dark Materials books to be honest. I've finally finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. He knows his craft, but the ending was a huge anti-climax for me. Which was a shame as I enjoyed the rest of the book--especially how the past and present narratives complimented each other. Planning to pick up Cormac McCarthy's The Road next, as I've heard it's one of several books that Bethesda's Fallout 3 team are using as their inspiration.

No -- looking through the eyes of your victim would be 2nd person I think.

The idea of having videos embedded in forum posts is very nice for users. I know there's at least one forum mod out there that lets you do this using BBcode, but I never got around to bringing it up here...

I finished Campaign in single player last night. Overall I'd say it's a solid 8/10 for me: Halo was never really about the story, it was about running around various types of environments and shooting stuff. Lots of stuff. Both the weapons and the enemies have seemingly been rebalanced for the final game--somewhat subtly, but it's definitely more enjoyable for it compared to the previous two. Where grinding frustration gave way to outright apathy for me in the last two single player experiences, Halo 3 wasn't so ridiculously unbalanced as to stop me from reaching the end without first slamming my head against a brick wall for 3 hours more than necessary. That said, the squad-mate AI is fucking abysmal, and now seemingly incapable of driving vehicles in any semblance of normality. Twice I had to restart entire sections because the AI simply cannot control the Warthog with any consistency: driving headlong into boulders in the middle of fields, careening into other scenery way off track, or just simply trying to drive up the steepest part of necessary inclines and failing. Then rinse and repeat -- it's screaming-at-the-screen awful. That aside, the rest of the game is excellent. There's a new type of enemy late in the game that's extremely cheap in its hit-and-run tactics - seeing as it can scale walls and leap vast distances - but otherwise the on-foot combat is really enjoyable. Grouping up with several Elite later in the game to take on the Flood is especially enjoyable. The settings too, whilst still using staples from the previous games, are more varied and more interesting than before--notably at the start and end of the story. Overall, it was 9 hours gaming well spent. However, I think replaying the campaign in 2+ co-op will put the single player experience firmly in the shade. It's just a shame the friendly AI wasn't more polished.

No drop in quality if you ask me, but then I love anything that looks at the Independent Gaming scene by poking holes in slovenly behemoths like PopCap.

I read about this in a magazine what seems like years ago, when the main character was male and trapped in some sort of abandoned research/testing facility. Changing the sex of the main character has little impact for me, but the radically different setting could provide greater intrigue. I imagined that the player would be cast in the role of some sort of sentient AI--kind of like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but helpful instead of malevolent. I do recall reading that you could purposefully harm the protagonist though, should they get off track or become non-cooperative, which I really liked the idea of too. For example, one instance had the player overloading a keypad for a door they didn't want the character to go through, so when they tried to type in a code they got an electric shock. The AI governing all that sounded extremely ambitious though...

It'll be the most cutting edge user-created mod available for the Source engine, I've no doubt. We'll see it soon I'm sure.

*cough* Fingers crossed!

"We got hostiles!" Love, love, love that moment. I'm not sure your comparison is entirely warranted, though: Splicers are just crazed lunatics with no worthwhile combat experience, whereas Half-Life's marines were an organised and regimented fighting force. Two very distinct and contrasting gameplay - and therefore AI - requirements in my opinion, both of which were executed perfectly.

Sounds superb, Rodi. My kids are really keen on board games at the moment and I'm hoping to nurture this as time goes on. I'd love to get them into something like Catan, once they're old enough. Also, I neglected to mention that we played electronic Whack-a-Mole on Sunday too.

Finished it on Thursday night last week. After being elated initially, then somewhat disappointed about midway through, it turned out to be worthwhile in the end. The story was great and more than made up for the combat.

Saturday Looked after kids all day as usual whilst Mrs V. goes to work and then cares for her aunt. Watched The Prestige with Mrs V. in the eveing; mind melts due to complex, dark - but ultimately brilliant - storytelling. Overal: :tup: Sunday Got up at 5:30am to watch the MotoGP live from Motegi, Japan; Casey Stoner wins the championship, vindicating my constant "but he's a fucking brilliant rider!" protestations for the entire season last year. Play Buckaroo and Tip 'n' Topple altogether in the afternoon, after an excellent roast chicken dinner. Decide at 9:15pm that I'd better go pre-order Halo 3: Limited Collector's Edition immediately at my local Blockbuster to avoid disappointment, which I do; get about twice as much credit as I was expecting when I trade in Halo 2 and King Kong at the same time. Overall: :tup:

Fuck off!

The Cillit Bang techno remix is mighty indeed.

So, basically, it's "PC or fuck off" then? :\ Come on Miff, we'll play over here...

"Calm down, dear!" There'll only ever be one Ginger - beard 'n' skin'ead or not.

I'm caving in, I admit it--I think I may buy Halo 3 after all. It just seems like too much co-op goodness - from the main campaign to the Forge game editing tools - to pass up out of sheer, bloody-minded elitism. That is all. PS: I can feel the pubes literally shedding from my groin with this confession.

It's definitely stigma that's kept me wary of all things Halo up to now--certainly from an online point-of-view. I've played through pretty much the entire single player campaign of the first and second games, but never dared take either of them online because of the seemingly omni-present Halo moron squads. Something that's really fucked me off about Halo 2 just recently is that, whilst co-op is specified as a multiplayer feature, the box never actually says "you must be sat next to each other, playing on the same machine, for co-op mode." Completely oblivious to this, I roped a friend into getting a used copy of Halo 2 in the hope we could play through the main campaign together--only to discover this wasn't possible over Live thanks to a little blurb of text in the multiplayer lobby when I switched to co-op mode. I'll be selling my copy post-haste, before its trade-in value likely plummets next week.

Kevin Eldon is woefully underappreciated. More: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XwEVzOegqzw